Producer: Gremlin Graphics
Retail Price: £7.99 cassette, £12.99 disk

With the ultra-serious Olympic Games just around the corner, Gremlin have decided that a little fun is in order. Alternative World Games is a spoof on sport itself and includes eight comical events.

On loading, the screen shows a parrot next to an old gramophone. The player can choose to compete for any of eight countries; the parrot then puts on a record which plays a tune associated with that nation. Up to eight players can compete, with only two playing at the same time.

The game selection screen contains a video recorder with nine monitors. Eight screens represent the events while the ninth contains an option to compete or practise. Having been chosen, the event is loaded in from the tape.

Event number one is the Sack Race in which the player must move from left to right avoiding the manholes.

The second event involves balancing a pile of plates. The fewer plates dropped, the higher your final score.

Next comes the Boot Throwing contest. The player must swing a boot round and round, then throw it as far as possible. You can select an empty or a water-filled boot; the full boot can travel farther but tires the player out faster.

Grab your vaulting pole and it's on to the River jump. You've hardly got time to catch your breath before you're trying to collect a bottle of champagne in the Pole Climbing contest.

Event six involves a Run Up The Wall carrying a hat, and is followed by a Pillow Fight in which you attempt to knock your opponent into the water.

In the final event, you must pogo around the course, within a given time limit, bursting balloons along the way.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: detailed backdrops, with slightly blocky and jerkily animated sprites
Sound: jolly loading tune and with a different tune for each country and event. Raspy in-game spot effects
Options: compete or practise the events in any order as the representative of any of eight countries

Alternative World Games seems to be just one big muitiload! All you do is load in one event, play it and load in another (even on the 128K!). The game is excellently presented, though, with animated parrots, country selections and a whole host of different tunes which improve when you start to play. Alternative World Games'strongest point is its variety. Every event is like a new game and, with eight to choose from, you can't lose. A particular favourite of mine is the Pile of Plates - you have to wobble along the ground, balancing as many plates as you can carry. I love the way they all crash to the floor - to your utter horror! Alternative World Games may not be graphically perfect, but it's worth buying even if it's just for the tunes!
NICK [88%]

It's good to see a light-hearted sports game for a change and Alternative World Games contains some very offbeat events. The country selection screen shows a large, well-animated parrot; I love the way he picks up a record with his beak and puts on the gramophone. The many tunes (different ones for each nation and event) really liven up the action. Each event is well presented with colourful backgrounds and smoothly animated characters. Unfortunately, some of the events are a little lacking in content - you sometimes spend more time waiting for an event to load, than actually playing it. However, with eight games in one, you get good value for money. Alternative World Games is a worthwhile package which should appeal to all but the most serious sports buffs.
PHIL [84%]

Following a string of serious sports games, mainly from the Epyx stable, it's nice to see Gremlin releasing a game with such silly events as Boot Throwing, Pole Climbing, Plate Balancing and Pogoing. The graphics are detailed, with large monochromatic sprites wobbling around the screen as they compete in some of the strangest sporting events you'll ever see. I spent a lot of time tearing my hair out because of the annoyingly long wait the player has to suffer between multi-loaded events. However, most of the events are worth the effort especially the plate balancing, which has the poor competitor teetering beneath a huge pile crockery. Take a look - Alternative World Games certainly makes a change from the usual run-of-the-mill examples of the genre.
MARK [82%]

Gremlin
£7.99
Reviewer: Ben Stone, Mike Dunn

The roar of the crowd. The taste of victory. Speed, sweat, steroids... sports sims. And here's another of them. Alternative World Games from Gremlin.

The inlay says that Alternative World Games will 'recapture the very essence of competitive sport', it also says that AWG will get you in the sack - but we wouldn't put much hope on it doing either.

There are eight events collected together in Alternative World Games, each is loaded individually and has its own fab tune. The control technique is similar to that used in the later 'Games' games (Summer Games, World Games, etc) as opposed to the Hypersports destructo-keyboard/joystick method. Believe me it ain't easy, responsiveness isn't one of the game's better points.

The events are as follows:

The Sack Race: A straight-forward two-player obstacle race against the clock. As the players hop along, the screen scrolls right revealing manholes which open up in a bid to trip you over.

Pile of Plates: A single-player race against the clock. More plates mean more points but a higher stack of crockery is a lot harder to handle.

Boot Throwing: Time your keyboard jabs carefully to correspond with your character's boot spinning, press fire when your power (shown underneath the playing area) is as high as it's gonna get and the boot'll go sailing off into the distance.

River Jump: The basic idea is to take a running jump over a river using a long pole to give you a bit of lift. Speed and timing are crucial if you're to qualify.

Pole Climbing: The very strange controls and illiterate instructions (even by our standards) made this event all but unplayable, but more about that later.

Run up the Wall: Without doubt the weirdest event in AWG. You first have to retrieve your hat from a parrot who flaps around at the top of the screen just out of reach. The next step is to catch the hat on your players head and then pummel the hell out of your keyboard to build up speed. A couple of nifty keyboard jabs later and you've got your hat stuck halfway up a wall.

Pillow Fight: No sports sim is complete without a bash 'em up. And even if you're a girly pacifist you'll be happy with this one - what more could you ask for than pillow fighting on a Gondala in Venice (what Venice has got to do with pillow fighting I'll leave you to decide).

Pogo: The last on the tape, but by no means the least, ('cos they're all as bad as each other) is a race against the clock to burst all the balloons in the playing area.

The front end has been well thought out and is in itself quite entertaining.

The event selector is also fun to play around with. As per usual for this sort of game you can choose to play or practice any of the events in any order. The screen is split up into nine with each section representing an event, choose an event and a short video sequence of it appears on its screen.

Getting into the game is made very difficult by the abysmal instructions, we were actually very surprised that something so badly written and un-informative could actually come from a software house as big as Gremlin, perhaps the inlay writer was having a bad day.

In fact, all of AWG's eight games have three basic problems; graphics implementation and playability. The graphical style used throughout AWG is chunky and undetailed. The backgrounds are ugly and the scrolling, where there is any, is as jerky as a go-go dancer with hiccups. AWG offers nothing but heartache, hassles, a few neat tunes and a chance to sully the sacrifical altar.

Label: Gremlin
Author: In-house
Price: £7.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Alternative World Games, huh. What's it an alternative to? Enjoying yourself? You'd certainly get that impression after slogging through this limp collection of half-hearted sports simulations.

Prepare yourself for long hours of tedium as the multi-load game limps it way into your Spectrum. After the rather good rendition of Fanfare for the Common Man (Keith Emerson eat your heart out) on the title screen, it's all downhill, and I'm not talking about skiing.

The game selection menu allows you to activate any number of video monitors showing the nine events. After entering the names and nationalities of the players, you select either practice or competition mode for the selected games and settle back for the long wait as the events load. A little animated gramophone with the national anthem for each country ("I'm A Lumberjack" for Canada???!!!) looked as sick as I felt by this stage.

And so to the games. Each one features a background showing a national monument; the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, the canals of Venice and so on. I wish they hadn't bothered; the graphics are blocky and uninspired, and the backgrounds scroll in great character-square jerks.

Against the backgrounds appear the worst-designed sprites I've seen this decade; scrappy little deformed pixies drawn with all the skill of a near-sighted baboon. Movement, controlled by joystick or definable keys, is the pits, and after the introductory theme tune for each event, sound effects are minimal.

The games themselves are played, as you'd expect, with a mixture of joystick-waggling and fire-button-stabbing.

SACK RACE takes place in the streets of Naples. You have to build up a left/right rhythm with the joystick, while using up/down to jump over manholes and recover from falls.

PILE OF PLATES sees you balancing a pile of any chosen size up to fifty plates. Stagger past the Colosseum, adjusting your speed and arm position to keep the wobbling pile balanced.

BOOT THROWING has you swinging a boot (empty or full of water) around your head, and releasing it as your power meter reaches maximum. Collapse with laughter as the boot falls on your head and squashes you!

RIVER JUMP gives you a big pole and tells you where to stick it (in the water).

POLE CLIMBING is a race for a bottle of champagne at the top of a slippery pole. It's UP-FIRE-DOWN-RELEASE until you get the bubbly.

UP THE WALL consists of catching top hats dropped by drunken parrots, and running up walls to deposit them on the top.

PILLOW FIGHT gives you two defensive moves and two aggressive, and your aim is to back your opponent off the pole into the water.

POGO sees you hopping around the course busting balloons. You have ten minutes to complete the course.

If you have the stamina, and necessary high threshold of boredom, to sit through the loading procedure and struggle with the awkward controls for each of the eight events, you must have a very boring life. Find something more entertaining to do instead, like watching the carpets grow.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £7.99

Here we have a sports simulation with tongue firmly planted in its cheek. The player is encouraged to compete in such wacky events as sack racing in Naples, boot throwing in the Colosseum, pole climbing in Verona, and running up the walls of Venice.

Once the competitor's identity and country of origin have been established, they are faced with a bank of nine video monitors, using the joystick each monitor can then be accessed in turn to demonstrate a game. When the player has decided which game to attempt, switching to the ninth monitor gives the option to either practice or compete in their chosen event.

If in practice mode, at the end of the race you are asked whether or not you wish to continue practising, in compete mode a score card is displayed, you can then chart your success. As Alternative World Games is multiload, it's best to attempt the events in sequence, manual positioning of the tape is possible, but is frustrating, and ultimately time consuming.

Graphically Alternative World Games is good, with nicely animated sprites bounding around the solid, colourful backdrops. Overall a playable alternative sports game that's fun, but thankfully does not tax the joystick as much as some games of this ilk.